The monitor has built-in speakers. They are rather large but don’t spoil the exterior: you have to look at the monitor from below to see them.
In the top part of the front panel, above the screen, there is a web-camera. Two stereo-microphones are on both sides of it, behind barely visible holes. The camera is fixed in the case, always facing forward.
Alas, the quality is awful. Putting an emphasis on the number of megapixels, both manufacturers and consumers forget that the quality depends on the lens rather than on resolution. If the lens is tiny, you can’t have sharp shots. You can do a simple experiment to check this out: take any digital camera, make a shot, and scale it down in your image editor to a resolution of 640x480 pixels, for example. It’s only 0.3 megapixels, but the quality is far higher than what you can get from most web-cameras, cell phones, and other such devices.
The 2263DX offers a generous selection of connectors: digital DVI-D and analog D-Sub inputs, HDMI, an integrated 2-port USB hub, headphones and microphone connectors. There is no line audio input because the 2263DX features an integrated audio card with a USB interface. As a result, the web-camera, headphones, microphone and, running a little ahead, the UbiSync 7 monitor can all be connected to the computer with a single cord. The 2263DX will still need a separate video cable, though. It cannot work via USB itself.
The control buttons are touch-sensitive. You only have to touch the necessary label with your finger. The buttons respond perfectly, I had no problems with false response or with the need to find the exact place to apply my finger to. The implementation is superb, no less convenient than traditional buttons. The monitor emits a squeak on your touching its buttons.
The Power indicator is located nearby. It is blue, small, and not very bright. It is not distracting. When in sleep mode, the indicator is blinking. The menu doesn’t allow to turn the indicator off although this option was available in some previous monitors from Samsung.
The monitor has Samsung’s traditional onscreen menu, which is user-friendly and intuitive. Its navigation is handy and its sections are logically organized. It’s good that the menu remembers the last changed option – when you open it up, you find yourself in the section you were in the last time you worked with the menu.
The button that usually switches between the MagicBright modes (a few combinations of specific brightness and contrast values) can now be redefined to enable MagicColor (automatic boost of color saturation) or to switch between image interpolation variants. There are two variants of the latter: the 4:3 image can be stretched to full screen or scaled up/down with unchanged proportions.
The monitor has 100% brightness and 75% contrast by default. I selected 40% brightness and 44% contrast to achieve a 100nit white. The contrast value is somewhat too high by default. You should not set it higher than 70% as it makes light halftones indistinguishable from white.
To remind you, the 100nit white is not some sacred number for me. It is just a reference point, the same for all monitors we test in our labs. The brightness of 100 nits is usually suitable for working with text under good office lighting. In a home environment, when the ambient lighting is less intensive, you may want to lower the screen brightness to 50-80 nits. In other words, you should set up your monitor depending on your specific conditions. Moreover, as a general rule, when you need a low screen brightness, it is wiser to reduce the brightness setting to its minimum and then to lower the contrast setting until you reach the desired level of white. So, it is quite normal if you have a near-zero brightness in the monitor’s menu while the contrast setting is but slightly lower than the default one (whereas I change both settings roughly in sync).
The 2263DX regulates its brightness by means of backlight modulation at a frequency of 317Hz.
